Iki-ningyō are life-sized dolls that were primarily used in festivals and exhibitions in Japan. This one, which belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum, is estimated to have been made around 1880, shortly after the samurai class was outlawed.

A forgotten fossil from the Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery has just now been shown to be a wholly new species of ichthyosaur. The fossil, brought to the museum in the 80s, was thought by the museum to be a plaster cast, until 25-year-old paleontologist Dean Lomax realized it was real in 2008. It's been named …

Seattle's EMP Museum dedicates most of its square footage to rock music (including an entire room of historically significant guitars), but the venue also hosts a steady stream of exhibits and events dedicated to other pop-culture avenues, especially science fiction.

Most museums content themselves with advertising whatever new exhibit they currently have going on. Science World, located in Vancouver, tried something different — actually, they tried a lot of of things different, and the results are some of the greatest, most clever ads we've ever seen.

When I got invited to Custom Melodies by Eternal Lips, I was skeptical. It sounded like another painfully self-aware ode to irony, the kind of art that can't see straight for its own winking. Perhaps it is. But it was also one of the most genuinely sweet experiences I've had in NYC.

China is currently undergoing a huge boom in museums—299 new ones have opened in the last year alone. And just like the US's own 20th century museum boom, which inspired cascades of forgeries, China's is bringing out the fakes: The government has shuttered one museum where a third of the 8,000 artifacts were fake.

The National September 11 Memorial Museum opens to the public tomorrow here in New York City after more than a decade of complications, and amidst not always civil disagreements over what the museum should be in the first place—what its narrative intentions might be and whether or not it could ever be possible to…

George is a male Lambeosaurus, except for his head, which is female, and one of his toes, which is fake. George hails from the prehistoric swamps of Alberta, but relocated to Vancouver where his bones are squished in plaster on a cramped museum wall. George is my first dinosaur.

The Final Member is a cute little documentary about a sweet little Phallological Museum in Iceland, and their journey to acquire the last piece to their collection: a human penis. And all the wacky hijinks that follow. We've got an exclusive clip from the movie, so you can see for yourself.

The Kirkaldy Testing Museum in London was once where materials were sent to die: to be tested to their breaking points, often pulverized, shattered, broken in two from sheer strain, punched clean through, or stretched—ripped and shredded—by hydraulics.

When the humongous Galápagos tortoise known as "Lonesome George" died in 2012, the last of his particular species died too. Now the American Museum of Natural History has the chance to display the taxidermied tortoise so kids can learn about creatures forever lost to time.

Talk about spooky: There's a statuette in a Manchester Museum display case that's slowly rotating — completely on its own — over the course of the day until it's facing the opposite direction. It might be the curse of Neb-Sanu — or perhaps something much simpler.

In what is one of the most dramatic dioramas in the Museum, a giant squid is caught in the sperm whale’s mouth, its tentacles grasping at the whale’s head, which is actually an oversized snout. Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephulus) interpret reflections of sounds generated by this uniquely shaped snout, employing a…

Photographer Klaus Pichler gained access behind the scenes of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna and captured the exhibits while they aren't on display. What he found were striking and often amusing views of sharks out of water, unexpected collections of cobras, and prehistoric humans stored alongside classical…